The State of My State: A Native Son's Search for West Virginia

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Years ago I stood in a conference room on the 50th floor of the Chrysler Building in New York City looking south toward the still standing World Trade Center towers. The conference room belonged to an advertising agency that had just pitched a new campaign for a diabetes drug that my client, a large pharmaceutical firm, was about to launch. In a moment I would have to critique the campaign and the assessment would not be flattering.

My experience growing up in a fading West Virginia mill town wasn’t often helpful in my job, but that day it was. The agency’s images of stylish, energetic seniors cavorting happily on tennis courts, ballroom floors, and beaches were stunning, even idyllic, but they bore no relationship to life in my Ohio River town and in the nearby Appalachian hollows where diabetes was rampant and where a large share of the new drug’s prospective users would be found.

Ad campaigns should be aspirational, but the agency had overshot the mark and landed in irrelevance. The designers and copywriters who were nearly all young urbanites from cosmopolitan, achievement oriented backgrounds had not been able to make the empathic leap into the geographically and culturally obscure world of Appalachia where the prevailing attitude wasn’t one of achievement and aspiration as much as it was of wry acceptance occasionally lapsing into fatalism.

Michael Harrington had described that world and atmosphere in anguishing detail in his 1962 book, The Other America in which he wrote of Appalachia,

Tens of millions of Americans are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care…. But even more basic, this poverty twists and deforms the spirit. The American poor are pessimistic and defeated, and they are victimized by mental suffering to a degree unknown in Suburbia.

Of course, Harrington was describing extreme circumstances, which weren’t shared by all or even most West Virginians. And in the decades since The Other America was published, the sharpest edges of material deprivation have been softened. Nonetheless, to this day West Virginia sits stubbornly at or near the bottom of state rankings for virtually all measures of wellbeing whether they are economic, medical, educational, environmental, psychological, or cultural. The progress that has been made is in large part attributable to government programs and to a lesser degree to commerce. Still, the oldest and most popular means of escaping the barrenness of Appalachian life remains emigration, which data show has drained West Virginia of at least half of the people who would have lived here had the state’s population growth mirrored the nation’s.

I stumbled upon that statistical oddity three years ago and it made me wonder. Is it possible that the flood of emigrants, beyond diminishing West Virginia’s population, has changed the state psychologically, culturally, and spiritually as well? Is it possible that those who leave are the most energetic and entrepreneurial among us and that those of us who stay behind are more inclined to acceptance and fatalism? Certainly those who leave are younger and better educated. And might those factors at least partially account for West Virginia’s chronic inability to catch up with the rest of America?

It was just speculation – a facile explanation for a large and multifaceted problem. But, it was the beginning of an ongoing exploration into my home state and the peculiar dynamics that so often make West Virginia a statistical outlier – nearly always in ways that, like my assessment of the advertising agency’s campaign, aren’t very flattering. In fact, beyond being a statistical outlier, West Virginia is often downright paradoxical; a place that often seems to operate countercyclically to the rest of America and sometimes counterintuitively as well, making nonsense of conventional methods for understanding how people, societies, and economies work.

How can a state that has fewer working adults than any other also have an unemployment rate that’s below the national average? Why does West Virginia’s economy sometimes seem comparatively prosperous, but only when the economies of all the other states are in decline? Why, if the coal industry is the engine that drives West Virginia’s economy, are the places where coal is mined among the most impoverished in the state and the nation? In fact, why does the coal industry, which comprises only 6% of the state’s economy, loom so large in the politics and perceptions of West Virginia?

Why do the people of West Virginia cling so determinedly to coal mining jobs which may sustain them financially, but which also destroy them sometimes suddenly in apocalyptic explosions and sometimes slowly and agonizingly through black lung disease and broken bodies? Why do we blow the tops off of our mountains?

Why does West Virginia’s latest putative economic savior, the natural gas industry, grow robustly while having little measurable impact on jobs or local economies? Why, when West Virginia’s extractive industries prosper, don’t West Virginia residents prosper as well?

Why in a state that relies more than any other on the federal government for incomes and healthcare do West Virginia’s political leaders ridicule Washington for its profligacy and rage against perceived federal intrusions? Why when statistically West Virginia stands to gain more from Obamacare than any other state, are state leaders at best ambivalent about taking advantage of the opportunity? Why does West Virginia have the highest rate of death by drug overdose in the nation?

Why when violent crime has been plunging for more than a decade in the rest of America has it been going up in West Virginia? Why, when in the aftermath of mass shootings that have made the rest of America more receptive to gun control measures, is West Virginia’s legislature furiously crafting new laws to vacate gun control laws and increase gun ownership and use?

Why in a state that has the lowest average level of educational attainment in America is West Virginia cutting funding for higher education even as it sits on a billion dollars in a rainy day fund and cuts business taxes? Why when West Virginians elected senators Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd to a combined fourteen consecutive terms, are they suddenly poised to replace Rockefeller with a candidate who is politically and philosophically his and Byrd’s diametric opposite?

Why is West Virginia sometimes called the most racist state in America when white voters there gave then candidate Barack Obama a larger share of their votes than did white voters in twenty other states?

Why do West Virginia residents, who are personally unpretentious and self-effacing, become enraged at the mere mention of the word, hillbilly and savage any personality foolish enough to tell a West Virginia joke or television executive foolish enough to propose a West Virginia-based reality TV show?

Why? Why? Why? The questions about West Virginia are endless – endless in number and endless in what they can reveal not just about the state and its people, but about humanity.

In the essays that follow, I try as best I can to explore the questions listed above and more besides. Still, some readers will be justifiably disappointed that more questions aren’t explored, particularly about important subjects such as education and the environment. But, there will always be more to ask and to say about West Virginia … and much more to do.

Sean O’Leary

March 20, 2013

THE STATE OF MY STATE

January 15, 2010

I once read that between the years 1900 and 2000 three-quarters of West Virginia towns vanished – ceased to exist. Most were probably remote coal camps abandoned when the mines that sustained them were exhausted. We’ve seen photographs of the refugees: gaunt men, women, and children dressed in smudged and tattered clothing, standing in front of wood shacks, looking doubtfully at a stranger who inexplicably insists on taking a picture. And from a distance of decades we thank God their unhappiness is only a memory … except that it’s not.

It’s true that much of the physical pain of poverty has been mitigated, so there aren’t as many heart-rending pictures. But the absence of opportunity and the accompanying loss of security and hope are still very much with us in West Virginia as is the resulting abandonment of communities and of the state by those who must concern themselves more with the future than with the past.

The statistics are stunning. West Virginia’s largest cities – Charleston, Huntington, and Wheeling – have lost nearly half of their populations in recent decades. The same trend applies in varying degrees to smaller cities. And West Virginia’s coalfields have also emptied as an industry that once employed more than 120,000 now employs fewer than 25,000.

Today West Virginia’s economic map consists of just three islands of prosperity amid an ocean of decline. The three counties forming the hook of the eastern panhandle are one island. Monongalia County, home of Morgantown and West Virginia University, is another. And Putnam County, wedged between Charleston and Huntington, is the third. These are the only counties out of fifty-five to experience population growth in this decade.

This picture of devastation may seem surprising because, as the current economic crisis rumbles through the country, political leaders boast that West Virginia has avoided much of the damage inflicted on other states. Personal incomes and employment have remained fairly stable as have home values except in a few areas and, although the state faces a $120 million deficit next year and mounting deficits in later years, that is mild compared to the struggles of other states. But, the bad news is that West Virginia’s resilience is best explained by the adage, When you haven’t risen far, you don’t have far to fall.

Personal incomes have remained stable because our population is the oldest, poorest, and most disabled in the nation, which results in a disproportionately large share of our incomes deriving not from work, but from entitlements that are unaffected by the recession. Much state revenue comes from transfer payments and coal severance taxes, which are also less affected. Finally, West Virginia’s housing market was depressed before the recession, so there were few new mortgages created during the period when most of the famously flawed lending practices took place.

But, while these factors insulate West Virginia against the immediate scourge, they do nothing about the more severe long-term problem. And, because no one gets rich from entitlements, to the degree West Virginia is spared from the current crisis, we’re also likely to be spared from the recovery.

If the direness of this portrayal seems out of kilter with what we usually hear, it’s because the media tend to focus on the present and recent past while the dynamics of degradation at work in West Virginia are gradual and epochal. Another is that politicians often emphasize the optimistic and anecdotal, particularly if they fear that the forces responsible for devastation transcend government’s ability to counteract them. But, whatever the reasons, a failure to grasp the severity and nature of West Virginia’s economic decline contributes to popular support for policies that would worsen it.

In the last twenty years the nation has seen a redistribution of wealth from middle and lower class households, of which West Virginia has many, to wealthy households, of which we have few. The Bush tax cuts delivered to West Virginians only 60% of the savings delivered to other Americans. Other trickle-down proposals popular among conservative populists, such as eliminating the capital gains tax and the Federal estate tax or "death tax, would follow the same pattern. West Virginians are among the least affected by these taxes and, consequently, would see the least benefit from their repeal. In fact, the death tax is almost comically irrelevant in West Virginia where it applied to only 183 households in 2008.

Repealing or cutting progressive taxes such as these would produce a catch-22 for West Virginia. If the cuts cause deficits to grow, they must be funded by remaining taxes of which West Virginians pay a greater share. If, on the other hand, deficits are offset by spending cuts, those cuts almost certainly must come from entitlement programs and transfer payments on which West Virginians depend more than other Americans. Finally, even if the cuts were to fulfill the supply-side fantasy by becoming self-financing, nearly